After the birth of our twins (our boys are now 7 – but she got treatment when they were about 1 and a half), my wife experienced an extended psychotic episode. It ultimately ended when she had voices in her heard telling her to kill herself and she knew that she needed to get help. She wasn’t convinced it was a mental health disorder, but we found an awesome psychiatrist that let me explain everything (with her in the room). He’d ask follow-up questions to her and she was prescribed Abilify and an anti-depressant.
Her psychotic symptoms disappeared very quickly after taking the Abilify, and she stayed on it for several months. However, she didn’t like the weight gain, and she asked the Psychiatrist if she could get off in favor of anti-depressants. He wanted to meet with her regularly during this time, and it seemed to go OK with no return to psychotic symptoms. I changed jobs and we could no longer see the psychiatrist, but she just had a family doctor prescribe the anti-depressants.
There were a few periods that seemed like breaks with reality during this time, but for the most part things went ok.
Our kids eventually went to elementary school and she decided to get a job at our kids’ school. Unfortunately, that was a very stressful situation for her and just a short time after starting she started to experience psychosis. For her, it starts with what she describes as “racing thoughts” where she can’t turn off her brain. I would wake up in the middle of the night and she would be talking to herself.
She then began to tell me about how teachers at the school wrote things in code on their whiteboards about her.
She realized she was experiencing a lot of things that she did the first time around and reached out for help. She was able to meet with a Psychiatrist (just once) who prescribed Seroquel (Quetiapine). She took it for a few days, the psychosis went away and she went back to her job.
I asked her multiple times about setting up additional appointments and she said that she didn’t need to because she didn’t have any mental health issues, it was just insomnia and the pills she was prescribed were only supposed to be used for insomnia (which is not true according to the directions on the bottle as well as the information in the post visit summary).
Fast forward about 6 months (beginning of May) and she began to have very regular psychotic episodes. For example, she pulled our kids out of class to tell them that Jesus was going to descend from the sky, and she became very paranoid that our children were going to be kidnapped. Any mention of potential mental health issues no matter how lovingly it is expressed results in an extreme level of anger (yelling at me and the kids for hours and sometimes days on end).
Also, as a side note, those 6 months I “fast forwarded” were filled with an unbelievable amount of anger, and vitriol toward me and our young kids. At times it is quite frankly an abusive environment for us.
The last few months have been filled with all sorts of delusions and a couple of hallucinations. For example, she told the kids that when I make dinner I am poisoning her, and she also has become convinced that I am having an affair (which is most certainly not the case). She was convinced that someone was in our backyard to kidnap the kids, but nothing could be corroborated by any video evidence (we have a camera), or physical evidence (i.e. our gate was shut and did not appear to be opened).
In the previous long stretch of psychosis, I was just patient, but at this point, this episode has been much, much worse, has lasted longer, and she has been quite abusive to both me and our kids (verbally and emotionally). While the symptoms at times improve (we may go a few days without a new delusion), the anger is ever present, and her absolute mistrust of me and the way she treats our kids has me thinking about moving towards the exits.
In my mind, me being patient hasn’t helped her to get any close to getting treatment, and at times our kids are not in an environment that is (emotionally) safe for them. I feel very anxious about leaving because I know that at least initially we would split time with the kids and on many occasions I have been the person to protect them from a lot of vitriol and abusive behavior.
If I were to leave, I am nearly certain that she would either realize that she needs to get treatment, or she would lose parental rights with the kids for a period of time (because of how she would treat the kids when I weren’t around). The kids are very important to her and it would likely lead to her getting long-term treatment (which is what I want no matter what happens between us). However, the situations the kids would be in to get her to that point make me extraordinarily nervous.
Unfortunately, she has lost the ability to think rationally and expressing any type of ultimatum for her to get treatment would result in an extreme level of anger and an unsafe situation for our kids.
I’m looking for any advice that you have. Thanks so much!